Taking care of Business Resilience

Article Publish Date: Wednesday 4 October 2017

In the modern world we operate in, the risks and challenges facing businesses are ever-changing. From adverse weather and transport disruptions to unplanned IT outages and cyber attacks, there are a multitude of uncontrollable elements that can impact your client’s ability to trade.

As an insurer it’s easy to focus on insurable elements such as a business’ property, equipment and liability, but we need to look further. We need to help businesses better understand the risks they face and ensure their teams are prepared to deal with them. Having a crisis management team with confidence in knowing what to do and how to do it is the key to having a resilient business. Our experience shows that the businesses with robust plans in place are the ones more likely to recover quickly and maintain trading should a crisis affect them.

Our new Business Interruption calculator can help your clients get the right levels of cover in place but it won’t replace lost customers or contracts if the business is unable to trade for a long time. Business resilience should be part of a company’s day-to-day activity, with trained teams and up to date, tested continuity plans. It should involve all key areas of the business, as well as ensuring plans are in place for members of the supply chain.

Our Aviva Premier proposition includes access to experts who can coach your clients in crisis management, alongside a range of tools and expertise that help ensure your clients have confidence in their plans to deal with any crisis in a practical way. We can even help your clients win business by demonstrating their resilience through ISO accreditation in Business Continuity.

Working with experts from Horizonscan and RiskEye we offer a range of solutions tailored to the client’s specific needs, including:

Business impact assessment – this is key to understanding what actions will be important to prioritise to ensure a swift business recovery. A full impact assessment will help ensure the insurance coverage meets these priorities and build a business continuity plan that focuses on the critical areas of risk.

Business continuity planning – a simple practical guide which sets out who, what and how you deal with the crisis. We offer a range of support from simple BCP templates face-to-face to training and coaching, right up to more comprehensive software-based planning tools and bespoke plans.

Crisis management skills – knowing the risks and having a plan to deal with them is only part of the solution. Having a team trained and competent in crisis management helps clients makes all the difference – we can coach and provide the skills and practical tools your client needs.

Crisisboardroom® kit– a practical toolkit which contains all the key contents and structure a customer may need to set up an effective crisis boardroom.

Crisis simulations – running a crisis simulation will assess the immediate activity, invocation and use of the business continuity plan (BCP): how the individual areas of a business work together; what the priorities are; and how the recovery process kicks into place. Whether it’s small improvements in cover, adding extensions to cover, amendments to the BCP, or more substantial requirements, a crisis simulation brings out the weaknesses to be addressed, and keeps the business’s BCP up to date and usable.

Accreditation – we can also help your clients achieve ISO22301 in business continuity management, which helps give customers and suppliers confidence in a business’s resilience.

RiskEye reputation management – in today’s society one of the most impactful risks on a client’s business can be the threat of negative content online and on social media, as for many customers and suppliers your clients’ online profile will be the first thing they see. Working with RiskEye, we can provide specialist expertise, educational support and guidance on ensuring any reputational risk it is managed quickly and effectively.

Business resilience support is just one small part of what we do to help our commercial customers have the belief that, should they experience an incident that impacts their business we can keep them trading and be back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible.

On top of that, the enhancements we’ve made to our Aviva Premier proposition providing automatic uplifts in cover, waiver of average and introduction of our new business interruption calculator alongside the insight of our claims and risk management experts means that together, with your support, we’re truly taking care of business.

For more information on our enhanced Aviva Premier proposition, available to you and your clients, check out our new Aviva Premier Brochure or contact your Aviva sales manager.